The forgotten story of the world’s deadliest plane crash

Tragedy usually hits hardest close to home, where the locations and places in query can set off grief and trauma long after the initial event has slipped queasily into the past. Which may clarify why the collective British reminiscence doesn’t simply recall the deadliest plane crash of all time: a disaster that passed off more than 8,000 miles away, on the other aspect of the planet, but claimed 520 lives. It did so an precise 40 years in the past today, on August 12 1985, on a wild mountainside, 60 miles north-west of Tokyo.

The destiny of Flight 123 is definitely not forgotten in Japan, where the scarring is still seen (there will likely be commemorations at the crash website today, as there are every 12 months). True, its loss of life didn’t match the 583 victims of the Tenerife Air Disaster of March 27 1977, where two Boeing 747s collided on the runway on the largest of the Canary Islands. Nor does it equate to the distinctive circumstances of the two Boeing 767s flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center on September 11 2001. But Flight 123 holds its own darkish place in the annals of aviation – as the deadliest crash involving a single plane.

A ticking time bomb

Perhaps inevitably, with a fatality depend of such terrible weight, that plane was also a 747 – particularly a 747 SR-46, toiling away for Japan Airlines (JAL). “SR” stands for “short range”, with the plane half of the growth in home flights in the Land of the Rising Sun that took maintain in the early Nineteen Seventies.

Demand was so high that, in 1972, JAL positioned an order with Boeing for a bespoke model of the “Jumbo Jet” – one tailored for most passenger capability, but with strengthened physique construction and touchdown gear ready to cope with the common take-offs and landings (and appreciable stress) inherent in short-haul flying. So it was that the 747 SR-46 emerged from Boeing’s Seattle plant with space for 498 travellers; a determine that would rise to 550 after additional modification. It made its first business flight, for JAL, on October 7 1973.

JA8119 – to use its registration quantity – arrived in the JAL fleet in 1974, and promptly turned a workhorse. By the time of its demise in 1985, it had chalked up 25,000 hours of flying, and 18,800 flights; the majority of them fast journeys back and forth between Tokyo and Japan’s other major cities. Flight 123 – a scheduled service from Haneda Airport in the capital to Itami Airport in Osaka, which ought to have taken one hour – was the fifth of six short hops it was due to make that day.

However, the trigger of the catastrophe was not rooted in that summer time afternoon in the mid-Nineteen Eighties. It had been planted seven years earlier – and with a grim symmetry, on the same route. On June 2 1978, JA8119 was broken by a heavy touch-down at Itami. The touchdown was so jarring that the 747’s tail hit the runway (a “tailstrike”) – so forcefully that this brought about cracking in the rear bulkhead, a important element of any plane’s pressurisation system. The breakage was repaired, swiftly but – it might transpire – insufficiently. JA8119 had 8,830 hours on its log at the time of the strike, and would fly on, without a lot additional incident, for 16,170 more. Yet deep within its fuselage, a clock was ticking.

The death toll from the crash was tragically inflated by unlucky timing: August 12 1985 fell within Obon season – a celebration of ancestral spirits, successfully Japan’s “Day of the Dead”, which strikes around the calendar, but usually sees the Japanese journey home in great numbers to spend time with family members. So it was that JA8119 was full of households for its early-evening departure. The data point out that, of the 524 passengers and crew on board, 502 have been Japanese. They included one notable movie star – the 43-year-old singer and actor, Kyu Sakamoto.

32 unthinkable minutes

JA8119 took off from Haneda at 6.12pm, a little behind schedule. For the next 12 minutes, it proceeded as regular. But at 6.24pm, as the 747 SR-46 crossed the coastal waters of Sagami Bay, 50 miles south-west of Tokyo, the decade-old patch-up job on its rear bulkhead finally failed. The plane suffered an explosive decompression which introduced down the ceiling at the back of the economic system cabin, severed all 4 hydraulic traces and knocked out the vertical stabiliser. At a stroke, the jet was all but uncontrollable.

At the reverse end of the plane, Captain Masami Takahama – a 49-year-old pilot of important expertise – remained calm. A misery call was put out; an emergency plan to flip Flight 123 around and return to Haneda was mentioned. But it soon turned clear that JA8119 was incapable of nuanced manoeuvre.

Cockpit recordings counsel its crew was already starting to undergo from hypoxia, a lack of oxygen in the decompressing jet main to slow solutions and an audible issue in comprehending instructions. In the 21 minutes which adopted the explosion, JA8119 flew erratically, lurching and rolling, gaining and dropping altitude – and, crucially, swerving north, so that it was back over land.

Its remaining 11 minutes have been a determined battle. By 6.45pm, the jet was descending quickly, had plunged to 13,500ft (4,100m), and was veering in the direction of high mountains. At 6.46pm, Takahama was heard to utter the weary phrases: “This may be hopeless.” At 6.49pm, there was a temporary stall, at 9,000ft (2,700m).

And while this was corrected, seven minutes later, at 6.56pm, JA8119 clipped a ridge on 1,979m Mount Takamagahara in Japan’s central Gunma Prefecture. The collision dislodged the end third of the proper wing, and two of the 4 engines. Now conclusively disabled, the 747 flipped onto its back, struck a second ridge, and exploded. The impression was so violent that it registered on the seismometer at the Shin-Etsu Earthquake Observatory, 100 miles away.

It is unattainable to say how many people have been still alive in the fast aftermath of the crash, because the rescue mission was as poorly executed as the restore work that had led to the catastrophe. It was still daytime when JA8119 went into the mountain, but as the mild pale, a Japanese army helicopter did a cursory scan of the website, and reported no apparent indicators of life. With night time imminent, and the terrain difficult, paramedics didn’t attempt to attain the wreckage until the following morning.

Interviewed in her hospital mattress, Yumi Ochiai, an off-duty flight attendant who was one of just 4 survivors – all feminine; all of whom had been sitting on the left hand aspect of the cabin, between rows 54 and 60 – remembered seeing lights and listening to the noise of rotor blades after waking up in the charred stays of the plane. She anticipated help to arrive, she said, but the only sounds she heard for the next few hours have been the cries of the injured and dying.

The fallout

The authorities response was moderately more clear-eyed. The official inquiry, which launched its findings on June 19 1987, positioned the blame on the insufficient restore in 1978. By that level, JAL president Yasumoto Takagi had already misplaced his job; he tendered his resignation on August 24 1985, less than a fortnight after the crash.

Sadly, the disaster claimed two additional victims as its aftershocks reverberated around Japan. Two JAL workers – upkeep supervisor Hiroo Tominaga, and engineer Susumu Tajima, who had inspected JA8119 after the tailstrike incident, and had declared it airworthy – took their own lives, buckling beneath the psychological burden of the catastrophe.

Forty years on, the crash website is home to a memorial; two unadorned stone triangles, set against the slope. The kin of the useless collect there every August 12, maybe taking small comfort from Mount Takamagahara’s place in Japanese folklore as a parallel to Greece’s Mount Olympus; a heavenly home of the gods.

There are more tangible echoes as nicely. Not least the Safety Promotion Center, a museum hooked up to Haneda Airport, which examines the causes of the catastrophe, and the classes to be learnt from it. Among its artefacts are fragments of the plane, and farewell letters written by its passengers in the 32 unthinkable minutes when they have been in all probability conscious that they have been going to die.

JAL has recovered to be Japan’s second greatest airline, but suffered an inevitable decline in the wake of Flight 123; passenger numbers fell by a third in the next 12 months, as a cautious public averted the model. Nonetheless, not everybody affected by the crash was put off flying. Captain Takahama’s daughter Yoko turned a flight attendant, working for JAL.

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